Destroy deserted embryos: academics
Canada should limit how long human embryos can be stored i n deep freeze to reduce the number of embryos hanging f rozen in potential “perpetuity” in fertility clinics across the country, academics are arguing.
These “abandoned” embryos belong to people now “lost to followup” — individuals or couples who have finished or dropped out of fertility treatment, stopped paying yearly storage fees or who can’t bring themselves to make a decision, leaving clinics in the legally tenuous position of either destroying t he embryos without clear authority to do so, or storing them indefinitely.
Up to a third of patients who undergo a cycle of IVF ( in vitro fertilization) will have more embryos than can be safely transferred — raising concerns more embryos are being produced than necessary.
Now, in a newly published paper, two Dalhousie University scholars suggest Canada follow the U. K., Denmark and New Zealand, where fertility clinics are legally within bounds to discard forgotten embryos if at least five or 10 years have passed since last contact with the “gamete providers;” every reasonable attempt has been made to reach them; and no clear written directions exist about what should happen to embryos no longer needed for “reproductive use.”
Even when prior instructions exist — discard, donate to research or to another infertile couple — clinics are loath to act without explicit consent from the people who created them, on the offchance they’ve changed their minds, Alana Cattapan and bioethicist Francoise Baylis write in Reproductive Biomedicine & Society Online.
Outside of Quebec, where there are some regulations, “there is no governance of abandoned embryos at the federal, provincial and territorial levels,” they said.
One option would be to introduce flexible, legal time limits so embryos could be discarded without clinics having to resort to the courts.
The authors cite the case of a B.C. fertility clinic that, when it ceased operating in 2012, had frozen sperm and embryos in storage for 1,200 people. Staff made hundreds of phone calls, sent registered letters and even hired a skip tracer. In the end, the clinic was granted a B.C. Supreme Court order permitting it to destroy what surplus “materials” remained.
No one knows how many abandoned embryos exist in Canada. Estimates in the U. S. range from 400,000 to 1.4 million.
In a 2003 study — the only one ever conducted — Baylis and colleagues reported there were 15,615 frozen embryos in storage in Canada — a figure most believe is now seriously outdated. Ten new IVF clinics have opened since 2003, meaning many more embryos have been created, and frozen.
Dr. Heather Shapiro, president of the Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society, said the extent of the problem i s unknown. “I don’t think we should assume it’s an epidemic, nor should we assume it’s a nonissue,” she said.
Clinics are moving to more genetic testing of embryos, she noted, where only the healthiest are picked for fresh transfer, leaving fewer frozen as backups.
Some U. S. clinics are offering to transfer unused embryos into the uterus of the IVF patient at a time when she’s highly unlikely to get pregnant, and with no in- tention of conceiving a child. “They’ll have all the embryos transferred, so they can die in the uterus,” Cattapan, a post- doctoral fellow in the faculty of medicine at Dalhousie University, said in an interview.
Embryos created in IVF can be a collection of as few as six cells. However, when a couple has already conceived as many children as they want, the decision to discard their unused embryos can be “gut- wrenching,” Cattapan said. “They think of those embryos as related in some way to the children that they have.”
Still, “If we have this idea that embryos are something that need respect, we should have clarity about what to do with them in a long-term way,” she said. “It might not be in the best interest of society to keep human embryos frozen in storage forever — and ever and ever.”
RELATED IN SOME WAY TO THE CHILDREN THEY HAVE.